Newton’s Dark Secrets

Movie review: "Newton’s Dark Secrets"

Isaac Newton was born in the same year Galileo Galilei died. Galileo had risked his freedom by challenging the fact that the earth travels around the sun. It was a new age when Science and Reason would redefine the whole world. Newton was gripped by this age of looking at things empirically. As a child he did all sorts of experiments which freaked out the neighbors. For example he flew a kite with candles on its tail one night which looked like a commit. There is another side to Newton’s childhood, when he was born his father died. By the time he turned three his mother re-married and moved away leaving Newton with his grandparents. Newton confessed that he was so enraged that he considered burning down the new house his mother and her new husband had while they were in it. When Newton was old enough he headed off to Cambridge, where he buried himself in his studies.

Isaac Newton: “Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation.”

He didn’t go anywhere he drove himself and worked seven days a week eighteen hours a day. He had his own library of 16,000-18,000 volumes. His world was a world that came through printed matter or manuscripts from others. His fellow classmates would go off to the local villages looking for bad women and fun but Newton wanted no part of it. To resist temptation Newton came up with a plan that he would stick to for the rest of his life.

Isaac Newton: “The way to chastity is not to struggle directly with incontinent thoughts, but to avert your thoughts with some other employment, by reading or meditating on other things, or by converse, for he who is always thinking of chastity will always be thinking of women.”

His only friend was John Watkins. They became roommates after both became unhappy with those who put pleasure before work. They lived in the same room for 20 years. Newton, as a student, devoured the latest scientific ideas. It was widely accepted that the planets revolved around the sun, but the question now was how did the planets move? What held them in their orbits? Newton was not satisfied with the popular theories such as that of René Descartes that the universe worked like the mechanics as found in a clock. Newton thought that the only kinds of statements that are acceptable are those that can be tested in the laboratory. But just as he was beginning to question the theories of Descartes the plague struck and the University was closed. Newton returned home to avoid infection. Isaac, in his old age said that the fall of an apple in his orchard at home was what told him what it was that held the planets in their orbits. An invisible force called gravity. Newton then invented Calculus, the quantitative study of the way things change, was a new branch of Mathematics, that is found today in Physics, Chemistry, Population Growth, Stock Market, Global Climate Change, and many other places. At the age of 22 he was the greatest Mathematician anyone had ever seen, and yet no one knew it because he kept it to himself. If that wasn’t enough, Newton overturned ideas of light. At first he used his own eye to perform experiments on light but later he employed a safer way to investigate light. He used a prism to separate the light, he then used a second prism to try and separate the other colors, but they remained the same color. He thought of the prism as a kind of separator of white light. Newton kept all this to himself. After the plague subsided he returned back to Cambridge where he worked his way up to Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He became well know for his premature gray hair and his long winded lectures on light. Newton had little time for students and they had little interest in him.

Newton’s Lab assistant “So few went to him and so few understood him that often times he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls.”

Fifty years prior to this, Galileo had made use of the telescope in order to view the stars and planets. But the telescope had a problem because its lens edges behaved like a prism separating the light from its original form and distorting the image. Newton figured out a way around this by using mirrors instead of lenses. Mirrors did not separate the light at all, so Newton made a small device about the size of a tall drinking cup.

Newton bragged that “it could magnify 40 times in diameter, more than any six foot device could do, I have seen Jupiter with it, distinctly round, and its satellites.”

Our huge telescopes are based on Newton’s design. Newton thought of this design as just a toy, until a colleague saw it and took it to King Charles the second. The effect his telescope had on Newton’s contemporaries was immediate and dramatic. It brought Newton on to the world stage of science. Newton was elected as a member of the Royal Society of London, a group of leading scientist in London. At this time however Newton had been working on Alchemy. The same year he became a professor he bought two furnaces, a set of chemicals and a strange set of books. It is said that with the right mix of chemicals an Alchemist could produce the philosopher’s stone. With this stone it was said to be able to perform miracles, cure diseases and turn lead into gold. While Newton was immersed in Alchemy his paper on light had ignited a firestorm in London. The man responsible for evaluating Newton’s paper in the Royal Society was Robert Hook, who would become Newton’s life long nemesis. Hook said that he accepted Newton’s experiments but whatever was new in them he had already done, and all of his claims about light were wrong. Newton was not very good at taking criticism, and threatened to leave the Royal Society. Unable to convince everyone of what he said about light, pushed him away from wanting to publish anything he did. By the 60’s and 70’s he withdrew from science completely.

Newton’s Lab assistant “What his aim was I was not able to penetrate into but his pains, his diligence, those times made me think he arrived at something far beyond the reach of human art and industry.”

Scientist consider his Alchemy as scientifically worthless. Newton believed that in the distant past people knew great truths about nature and the universe. This wisdom was lost over time but Newton thought it was hidden in ancient Greek myths which he interpreted as alchemical recipes. (See “The Book of Enoch”, and “The Secrets of Enoch”)

For most of his life Newton held a dangerous secret. As a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was required to become a minister in the Church of England, but this was something he violently opposed. Newton became convinced that the central doctrine of the trinity or the Idea that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all equally divine was not true. The more ancient texts he read the more he was convinced that Jesus was the Son of God, but not God’s equal. Newton read himself into heresy. Newton comes to the conclusion very early on that the trinity is a blasphemy of the first commandment, which said “Thou shall have no other gods before me.” And the worship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as equal and divine was a heresy, but denying the trinity was illegal, and Newton was risking everything by these beliefs. If Newton had been exposed, while at Cambridge as an anti-Trinitarian, his career would have been over. He would have been ostracized although it would not have involved being put to death, but prison would have been one possibility. Newton was excused from being a minister, but in his life time and in his own privacy he wrote more about Theology and Alchemy than Science and Mathematics combined. For Newton science and religion were inseparable, two parts of the same lifelong quest to understand the universe. Newton's world was very much motivated by theology unlike the way he was portrayed by the world as cold and calculating.

Isaac Newton “A most beautiful system of the sun planets and commits could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

He had more than 30 bibles and he examined them more rigorously than he did anything else. Correlating Biblical passages with astrological information he re-dated ancient history drawing up elaborate charts and chronologies that show civilization starting at around 980 BC. He worked on this over a period of 30 years. Newton also combed the Bible for keys to the future. What he was trying to do was determine when the end would come, when Christ would return, when all the apocalyptical events of the end times would come to a head. He came to the year 2060.

In Newton’s 40’s he got a visit from an Astronomer named Edmond Halley. Halley asked Newton an esoteric question about planetary orbits.

Edmond Halley “What kind of curve would be described by the planets supposing the force of the attraction toward the sun to be reciprocal of the square of the distance from it.”

Newton “An ellipse.”

Halley “An ellipse? How do you know?”

Newton “I’ve done the calculation.”

Halley “You have? How did you calculate it?”

Newton “I’ll re-calculate it and send it to you.”

Four months later what Halley received would change science forever. Through observation, Astronomers discovered that the planets moved around the sun, not in perfect circles, but in elliptical orbits, but no one could explain why. Halley and others guessed that the planets had to be attracted to the sun by an invisible force called the inverse square law:

F=1/r²

But no one had been able to prove that this resulted in elliptical orbits. Halley received the proof that a planet traveling around the sun must travel in an elliptical orbit. Newton likely used Calculus to prove this but he wrote the proof using Euclidian Geometry. Newton wanted more than a mathematical proof; he wanted to know how the planets moved through space. For the next 18 months Newton worked on this question day and night. When he was done he submitted a 500 page masterpiece, “The Principia Mathematica” to the Royal Society of London. Newton was providing a new framework for understanding the universe, building on centuries of work from his contemporaries. Newton devised the three laws of motion.

1.) An object in motion will remain in motion forever unless acted upon by an external force.

2.) An object’s rate of acceleration is proportional to the force acting on it.

3.) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton devised a thought experiment to show that the orbits of the moon and planets were the same as objects projected from earth. He imagined a canon fixed from an extremely tall mountain. In a bold leap, Newton proclaimed that his invisible force operates everywhere in the universe. Newton called it the universal law of gravitation.

F _g = g • (m₁ • m₂)/r²

It answers the question as to what causes the rise and fall of the tides. The rest of science today has built off of that foundation. Newton’s critic Hook claimed that he had come up with the key ideas first. Later others criticized the fact that Newton did not explain what gravity really was, just how to calculate its strength, Newton didn’t understand it himself. After Newton recovered from a breakdown, likely from exhaustion combined with mercury poisoning, he moved to London and became Master of the Mint, a well paying job that put him in charge of issuing new currency and cracking down on counterfeiters. About two dozen counterfeiters were executed while Newton was in charge. Newton became a Member of Parliament, president of the Royal Society and was knighted. A year after Robert Hook died Newton published his second greatest masterpiece OPTICKS, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. At the end of this book Newton finally wrote some of his key ideas of Calculus, 40 years after they were conceived. Right up to his death Newton tried to keep his belief about the trinity a secret and he felt that there was no point in trying to convince others of this because the time was not right. People were not fit to receive the kind of word he was giving out. He died at the age of 84.